Senate will revisit devolution of powers bill – Saraki

The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has said that the devolution of powers bill would be revisited, when the National Assembly resumes from its recess.

Speaking with journalists in Ilorin, Kwara state on Saturday, Saraki stated that the bill did not scale through, because of the pervasive mistrust and disillusionment in the country.

He said: “Although they were defeated at the committee level but they quickly energised, moved around and did some lobbying and they passed through.

“You went through the process in making sure that something you believe in scale through. Even when it looked as if it was going down you were not perturbed. You did not resort to abuses and went about lobbying and with the support of the National Assembly it scaled through. Both Senate and House of Representatives believe that is good for our democracy.

“The fact that the devolution bill lost that day does not mean it will not scale though after the recess.

“As you know that in the Senate we have three senators representing each state of the federation and the Federal Captial Territory (FCT).

“Whatever we do there, we must engage and have a feedback from our constituencies. I believe that if this constitutional amendment had come about eight months ago, the devolution bill would have been passed easily. But I think we must be honest with ourselves that presently, there is a lot of mistrust in the country.

“The air is very polluted. Let us be very frank and that blame must be all round. What happened was that a lot of people misread or misunderstood or were suspicious of what the devolution bill was all about.”